Ms. Hunting Creek is a writer in Virginia. Her work has appeared in The Toast, The Airship, The Washington Post, and Medium. When she isn't rooting for the California Golden Bears, she designs textile art, reads cookbooks in bed, and wrangles two cats, a golden retriever, and her husband..

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Top From Scraps, or Color-Blocking by Necessity

After cutting Vogue 1291 out of two colors of stretch lace from Gorgeous Fabrics, I had so many ginormous odd shaped scraps that I thought I'd try to make another top out of them.(The Vogue pattern has very weirdly shaped pieces and HUGE sleeves.) As we all know, one of the most important Sewing Commandments is Thou Shalt Not Waste Fabric. I used the selvage for the hems on both the body and the sleeves, because they were pretty- and I wasn't sure how I'd like machine hemming the lace.I used a strip of selvage as the neckline edging.I did not follow their directions,(which are wackadoodle, btw) but instead, sewed the selvage strip on the wrong side first then trimmed the seam and folded it over the front and then zigzagged that down with matching thread. It's a clean finish on the inside and super pretty on the outside:This is an adapted version of Simplicity 4076 view C with elbow sleeves instead of bell sleeves. I drafted them myself by copying the top of the long sleeve and measuring how long I wanted them. Easy and I knew they'd work because they were drafted from an existing sleeve. Also I didn't have enough of the fabric for the longer sleeves, but it's almost summer anyway. Who needs long sleeves now?It came out pretty for what is essentially a free top. I still haven't finished the Vogue one yet. But it's in the stack. It was more fun trying to make the free one work.

4 comments:

Pretty! I like the lace, and the color combo. Funny how it often ends up being more fun to make things out of leftover fabrics and being creative than just sewing what you were planning on making in the first place.